Studies:

10/1995 - 07/1997, University of Turin, Faculty of Letters and Philosophy, Department of Linguistics and Literature. (languages: German and English , Computational Linguistics Seminars).

10/1997 - 09/1998, University of Bielefeld. Participation in the ERASMUS/SOCRATES-Program.

9/1998, University of Bielefeld. PNdS/DSH examination to enter a German university.

10/1998 - 07/2001, University of Bielefeld. Studies of Computational Linguistics.

Master Thesis:

2001, "Die Mensch-Maschine-Kommunikation: Agententechnologie im Internet" (in German), University of Bielefeld.

Doctoral Thesis:

2008, "Semantic Support for Multilingual Text Retrieval" (in English), University of Magdeburg.

Practical Trainings:

04/1999 - 07/1999, Practical training in Bertelsmann company ( I planned the homepage “Klassiker Kabinett” and the online- catalogue for the database www.mountmedia.de/verlage/gold_tb/klassiker_kabinett).

09/1999 - 10/1999, German teacher at the University of Bielefeld (training for „Deutsch als Fremdsprache“ studies) and subeditor of the newspaper of the course.

02/2000 - 06/2000, I had the responsibility for the design of an automatical Text- Extracting-System in the computer department of the Lernout ans Hauspie Deutschland company (www.lshl.de). They required computational linguistics know-how. My task was to design a system considering following formulation of the question: normalization (Abbreviations of product descriptions with their baseforms to replace) , rationalization (simplification of product descriptions to the noun/adjective/adjective structure), categorization (according to the UN/SPSC-guidelines, www.unspsc.org) and clustering (arrange the dates in groups) of database-supported-online-catalogues. I had also the opportunity to examinate the “translation memory system” of the company, it was used for the translation of technical texts in all languages..

07/2000 - 12/2000, Practical training in the Web-company Vista* New Media (www.vista.de). The company creates virtual agents for the Internet. I supported the computer department of the company in advising of computational linguistics applications (expert knowledge to the parser optimization). Linguistic and ergonomic optimization and error-elimination for the virtualbrain editor (optimization of the parser). I improved the functionality of the current database ( synonyms, baseforms and part of speech position) and conceived active and passive speech dialogues for the current question - answering system (content-management, process representation and realization of an online-demo). I worked with SQL and programmed also HTML. I wrote technical documentary reports and researched in the Internet..

Professional Experiences:

10/1997 - 05/1998 International interviewer for different countries, translator and proof-reader of Italian studies for the market research institute EMNID (member of the Taylor Nelson Sofres group of companies).

1997 - 1999 Technical translator and proof-reader at the university of Bielefeld for the italian language.

09/1997 - 01/2000 Italian teacher in the private school „Tandem” in Bielefeld.

02/2000 - 06/2000 Italian teacher in the private school „Inlingua“ in Köln.

08/2001 - 12/2002 Research Consultant at the ITC-Irst in Trento.

01/2003 - 03/2003 Research Consultant at the European Academy in Bolzano.

09/2003 - 09/2007 Scientific Researcher at the Department of Knowledge and Language Engineering, Information Retrieval Group, Faculty of Computer Science, Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg.

04/2007 - 05/2007 Visiting Researcher at the Human Communication Research Centre, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh.

10/2007-10/2009 Scientific Researcher at the Department of Technical and Operational Information Systems, Data and Knowledge Engineering Group, Faculty of Computer Science, Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg.

Since 10/2009 Director of the Competence Center "Information Retrieval and Machine Learning" at the DAI-Lab, Technische Universität Berlin.

Languages:

Italian (native speaker).

German (11 years in Germany, very good knowledge in written and spoken language).

English (good knowledge in written and spoken language).

French (good knowledge in written and spoken language).

Spanish (basic knowledge).

Foreign Language Courses::

Summer 1991 French language course in Biarritz (organized by EF).

Summer 1992 English language course in Hastings (organized by EF).

Summer 1994 English language course in Brighton (organized by EF).

Summer 1997 German language course in Bielefeld (organized by Tandem).

Summer 1998 German language course in Bielefeld (organized by Bibis).